Tag Archives: citrix

Not so long ago, customers were simply faceless names and transactions understood through disjointed sales data and potentially inaccurate contact information.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen companies across industries make remarkable business transformations to become customer-centric organizations. These companies understand that customers are no longer loyal to brands or products alone. Instead, they’re loyal to companies who provide the optimal, most personalized customer experiences.

By understanding more about their customers, their interests, and their interaction preferences, organizations can ultimately encourage increased sales and usage of their products and services.

As we begin 2015 and predict what the next trends will be, I believe that this year will finally be the year that customer centricity becomes the norm – and effective management of data will play the most critical role to date in getting companies to reach their customer centricity goals.

But it won’t necessarily happen overnight. So how should companies get started with this effort?

“A requirement behind customer centricity is the ability to understand customers at a fairly granular level and to be able to identify the customers or the segments of customers who are valuable from the ones who aren’t,” writes Peter Fader (Co-Director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania). “If you can’t sort out your customers — if you can’t look at them and know who is good and who is bad — then you can’t be customer centric. That’s step one.”

More and more companies are working through strategies for what Peter Fader describes as step one. They understand their data, and explore ways to utilize this information to gain valuable insights. For example, consider the advancements that Citrix achieved (read more in this case study). By better understanding their customer data, they saw a 20% improvement in lead conversion.

The organizations that have a better understanding of their customers are leading the way by utilizing technology to ensure data accuracy. If their contact data (address, email, and phone) is correct, then they can effectively reach that customer without fail. If their contact data is poor, connecting with customers becomes impossible and can ultimately impact their ability to compete.

As companies continue to understand their customer data, they’ll look to fill in the gaps. Sometimes, these gaps are obvious. If a customer’s contact profile has a hole in it – for example a missing phone number – it becomes clear that the hole must be filled.

Utilizing Data as a Service enrichment and validation capabilities, organizations have the opportunity to clean up missing data without wasting a high value customer interaction to ask for their phone number. Instead, they can spend their time selling to this customer.

In addition to filling the contact profile gaps, Data as a Service subscription data is also a great way to expand the view of the customer and learn more about them. Companies can enrich their customer profiles with demographic information or industry data to round out their customer profiles, further supporting their customer-centricity goals.

In 2015, we will see companies utilizing their customer data to form a deeper connection and ultimately increase sales. The habit of “Speaking at” customers will fall by the wayside of true engagement. If customers are the lifeblood of an organization, then, in 2015, we’ll see more and more companies leveraging Data as a Service to increase customer loyalty — and ultimately fuel business growth.

Citrix: You may not realize you know them, but chances are pretty good that you do. And chances are also good that we marketers can learn something about achieving fortune teller-like marketing from them!

Citrix is the company that brought you GoToMeeting and a whole host of other mobile workspace solutions that provide virtualization, networking and cloud services. Their goal is to give their 100 million users in 260,000 organizations across the globe “new ways to work better with seamless and secure access to the apps, files and services they need on any device, wherever they go.”

Citrix is a company that has been imagining and innovating for over 25 years, and over that time, has seen a complete transformation in their market – virtual solutions and cloud services didn’t even exist when they were founded. Now it’s the backbone of their business. Their corporate video proudly states that the only constant in this world is change, and that they strive to embrace the “yet to be discovered.”

Having worked with them quite a bit over the past few years, we have seen first-hand how Citrix has demonstrated their ability to embrace change.

The Problem:

Back in 2011, it became clear to Citrix that they had a data problem, and that they would have to make some changes to stay ahead in this hyper competitive market. Sales & Marketing had identified data as their #1 concern – their data was incomplete, inaccurate, and duplicated in their CRM system. And with so many different applications in the organization, it was quite difficult to know which application or data source had the most accurate and up-to-date information. They realized they needed a single source of the truth – one system of reference where all of their global data management practices could be centralized and consistent.

The Solution:

The marketing team realized that they needed to take control of the solution to their data concerns, as their success truly depended upon it. They brought together their IT department and their systems integration partner, Cognizant to determine a course of action. Together they forged an overall data governance strategy which would empower the marketing team to manage data centrally – to be responsible for their own success.

As a key element of that data governance / management strategy, they determined that they needed a Master Data Management (MDM) solution to serve as their Single Trusted Source of Customer & Prospect Data. They did a great deal of research into industry best practices and technology solutions, and decided to select Informatica as their MDM partner. As you can see, Citrix’s environment is not unlike most marketing organizations. The difference is that they are now able to capture and distribute better customer and prospect data to and from these systems to achieve even better results. They are leveraging internal data sources and systems like CRM (Salesforce) and marketing automation (Marketo). Their systems live all over the enterprise, both on premises and in the cloud. And they leverage analytical tools to analyze and dashboard their results.

The Results:

Citrix strategized and implemented their Single Trusted Source of Customer & Prospect solution in a phased approach throughout 2013 and 2014, and we believe that what they’ve been able to accomplish during that short period of time has been nothing short of phenomenal. Here are the higlights:

Used Informatica MDM to provide clean, consistent and connected channel partner, customer and prospect data and the relationships between them for use in operational applications (SFDC, BI Reporting and Predictive Analytics)

Recognized 20% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rates

Realized 20% increase in marketing team’s operational efficiency

Achieved 50% increase in quality of data at the point of entry, and a 50% reduction in the rate of junk and duplicate data for prospects, existing accounts and contact

Delivered a better channel partner and customer experience by renewing all of a customers’ user licenses across product lines at one time and making it easy to identify whitespace opportunities to up-sell more user licenses

That is huge! Can you imagine the impact on your own marketing organization of a 20% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion? Can you imagine the impact of spending 20% less time questioning and manually massaging data to get the information you need? That’s game changing!

Because Citrix now has great data and great resulting insight, they have been able to take the next step and embark on new fortune teller-like marketing strategies. As Citrix’s Dagmar Garcia discussed during a recent webinar, “We monitor implicit and explicit behavior of transactional leads and accounts, and then we leverage these insights and previous behaviors to offer net new offers and campaigns to our customers and prospects… And it’s all based on the quality of data we have within our database.”

I encourage you to take a few minutes to listen to Dagmar discuss Citrix’s project on a recent webinar. In the webinar, she dives deeper into their project, the project scope and timeline, and to what she means by “fortune telling abilities”. Also, take a look at the customer story section of the Informatica.com website for the PDF case study. And, if you’re in the mood to learn more, you can download a complimentary copy of the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM of Customer Data Solutions.

Hat’s off to you Citrix, and we look forward to working with you to continue to change the game even more in the coming months and years!

“Start your master data management (MDM) journey knowing how it will deliver a tangible business outcome. Will it help your business generate revenue or cut costs? Focus on the business value you plan to deliver with MDM and revisit it often,” advises Michael Delgado, Information Management Director at Citrix during his presentation at MDM Day, the InformaticaWorld 2014 pre-conference program. MDM Day focused on driving value from business-critical information and attracted 500 people.

Did you know that every 2 seconds an aircraft with GE engine technology is taking off somewhere in the world?

Ginny Walker, Chief Enterprise Architect at GE Aviation

GE Aviation’s Chief Enterprise Architect, Ginny Walker, presented “Operationalizing Critical Business Processes: GE Aviation’s MDM Story.” GE Aviation is a $22 billion company and a leading provider of jet engines, systems and services. Ginny shared the company’s multi-year journey to improve installed-base asset data management. She explained how the combination of data, analytics, and connectivity results in productivity improvements such as reducing up to 2% of the annual fuel bill and reducing delays. The keys to GE Aviation’s analytical MDM success were: 1) tying MDM to business metrics, 2) starting with a narrow scope, and 3) data stewards. Ginny believes that MDM is an enabler for the Industrial Internet and Big Data because it empowers companies to get insights from multiple sources of data.

Did you know that EMC has made a $17 billion investment in acquisitions and is integrating more than 70 technology companies?

EMC’s Barbara Latulippe, aka “The Data Diva,” is the Senior Director of Enterprise Information Management (EIM). EMC is a $21.7 billion company that has grown through acquisition and has 60,000 employees worldwide. In her presentation, “Formula for Success: EMC MDM Best Practices,” Barbara warns that if you don’t have a data governance program in place, you’re going to have a hard time getting an MDM initiative off the ground. She stressed the importance of building a data governance council and involving the business as early as possible to agree on key definitions such as “customer.” Barbara and her team focused on the financial impact of higher quality data to build a business case for operational MDM. She asked her business counterparts, “Imagine if you could onboard a customer in 3 minutes instead of 15 minutes?”

Did you know that Citrix is enabling the mobile workforce by uniting apps, data and services on any device over any network and cloud?

Michael Delgado, Information Management Director at Citrix

Citrix’s Information Management Director, Michael Delgado, presented “Citrix MDM Case Study: From Partner 360 to Customer 360.” Citrix is a $2.9 billion Cloud software company that embarked on a multi-domain MDM and data governance journey for channel partner, hierarchy and customer data. Because 90% of the company’s product bookings are fulfilled by channel partners, Citrix started their MDM journey to better understand their total channel partner relationship to make it easier to do business with Citrix and boost revenue. Once they were successful with partner data, they turned to customer data. They wanted to boost customer experience by understanding the total customer relationship across products lines and regions. Armed with this information, Citrix employees can engage customers in one product renewal process for all products. MDM also helps Citrix’s sales team with white space analysis to identify opportunities to sell more user licenses in existing customer accounts.

Did you know Quintiles helped develop or commercialize all of the top 5 best-selling drugs on the market?

John Poonnen, Director Infosario Data Factory at Quintiles

Quintiles’ Director of the Infosario Data Factory, John Poonnen, presented “Using Multi-domain MDM to Gain Information Insights:How Quintiles Efficiently Manages Complex Clinical Trials.” Quintiles is the world’s largest provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services with more than 27,000 employees. John explained how the company leverages a tailored, multi-domain MDM platform to gain a holistic view of business-critical entities such as investigators, research facilities, clinical studies, study sites and subjects to cut costs, improve quality, improve productivity and to meet regulatory and patient needs. “Although information needs to flow throughout the process – it tends to get stuck in different silos and must be manually manipulated to get meaningful insights,” said John. He believes master data is foundational — combining it with other data, capabilities and expertise makes it transformational.

While I couldn’t attend the PIM customer presentations below, I heard they were excellent. I look forward to watching the videos:

I also had the opportunity to speak with some of our knowledgeable and experienced MDM Day partner sponsors. Go to Twitter and search for #MDM and #DataQuality to see their advice on what it takes to successfully kick-off and implement an MDM program.

There are more thought-provoking MDM and PIM customer presentations taking place this week at InformaticaWorld 2014. To join or follow the conversation, use #INFA14 #MDM or #INFA14 #PIM.

My post today will take you through a more detailed look at the free pre-conference MDM Day on May 12th at Informatica World 2014 (May 13-15). These day-long events are so popular that we’ve even had to turn away attendees in past years. Prospective customers, clients and partners tend to find these presentations and panels extremely valuable.

To get an idea of the type of presentations you will see, view these videos from our last sold-out MDM Day in New York. The presentations, Q&A sessions, and breakout discussions provide rich insight into real-world experience with MDM and Informatica solutions.

The Las Vegas MDM Day will include presentations by customers on their MDM experience, best practices presentations, demonstrations of our latest release functionality, an overview of our planned roadmap of future releases, and breakout sessions for in-depth discussions.

Below is a more detailed look at some of the agenda highlights:

Ginny Walker, chief enterprise architect at GE Aviation will present their multi-year journey to improve their installed-base asset data management. A panel discussion among experts from Thomson Reuters, HP, and Accenture will follow.

The Sr. MDM Manager from St. Jude Medical, Andrew Urbanski, will discuss how their MDM program drove up business value inside their organization from initial use case through follow-on solutions. A discussion among panelists from EMC, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Wipro will follow.

Michael Delgado, Information Management Director at Citrix, will present “Citrix MDM Case Study: From Partner 360 to Customer 360,” which takes us through the Citrix multi-domain MDM and data governance journey for channel partner, hierarchy and customer data. The follow-up panel will include experts from AutoTrader, McAfee-Intel Security , and Deloitte.

John Poonnen, the Infosario Data Factory Director at Quintiles, will present how his company leverages a tailored, multi-domain MDM platform to gain a holistic view of business-critical entities such as investigators, research facilities, clinical studies, study sites and subjects. A discussion among panelists from Abbvie, Infoverity and CapGemini will follow.

Dale Denham, CIO at Crestline/ Geiger, will present how product information improved Geiger’s ecommerce ability to promote and sell products. Later, he will be joined for a panel discussion with experts from Deloitte, LumenData and Ideosity.

The afternoon will feature presentations and breakout sessions led by Informatica product teams giving demonstrations of new product features, business and use cases and roadmaps. Each session is addressed to specific audiences to provide the most relevant information.

Our “Ask the Experts” session closes the day with 11 tables hosted by Informatica employees willing to have discussions with anyone in attendance. Lots of great questions are raised after a day of new in-depth information.

Networking breaks and lunches also provide a chance for more casual discussion among Informatica experts, customers and partners.

In my last post, I gave you a taste of our upcoming events: Informatica World (May 13-15) and our special pre-conference MDM Day (May 12) in Las Vegas. Today, I am going to take a closer look at various MDM sessions that will provide many opportunities to dive deep into this exciting technology.

We have several panels and sessions featuring Informatica clients and their real-world experiences with implementing MDM, overcoming challenges, and capitalizing on results. Citrix, Liberty Mutual, Morgan-Stanley, Nordstrom, Quintiles, and Thomson Reuters are just a few of the companies participating in this great event.

Here are a few sessions that I highly recommend attending:

What’s New in Informatica MDM? – On Tuesday, my colleague Suresh Menon and I will present how Informatica MDM’s enhanced capabilities deliver even more flexible, scalable, rapid management of multi-domain master data on premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid. This demo will show how the platform integrates with PowerCenter, Data Quality, and BPM. Attendees will also see a view of the product roadmap.

Scaling MDM to Enterprise Size: Lessons Learned from HP’s ‘Ginormous’ Volume – Fran Anniballi and William Arkles from HP will present how leveraging master data can be key to application and business transformation, while addressing how loading huge volumes of data for hundreds of millions of records and thousands of users globally is a daunting challenge.

AutoTrader’s Operational MDM: Creating A 360-Degree Customer View from M&As – On Wednesday, Jaideep Siswawala and Rachel Hua from AutoTrader will present on how to integrate multiple acquisitions after establishing a real-time operational MDM hub. In addition, AutoTrader will discuss how they used multi-domain MDM to create a 360-degree view of customer relationships to help dealers, OEMs, and ad agencies for increased revenues and greater customer satisfaction.

McAfee-Intel Security and PricewaterhouseCoopers: Two Distinct Best-in-Class MDM Implementations – McAfee-Intel will present on how they use MDM to base critical business decisions and sales territory planning with a 360-degree view of customers and partners. PwC will present its use-case for global customer on-boarding and risk analysis.

We are happy to announce many opportunities to add to your MDM knowledge at this year’s Informatica World Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference will run between May 13-15 and will feature many MDM sessions within the conference agenda and a pre-conference MDM Day on May 12th focused solely on MDM and PIM sessions.

May 12: MDM Day, “Driving Value from Business-Critical Information”

After the overwhelming response to our New York MDM Day in February – we are hosting a pre-conference MDM Day with a laser focus on MDM and PIM. Attendance is free when you register for the full Informatica World Conference. This Day features more than 20 sessions to choose from and provides a chance to learn from experts such as St. Jude Medical, Citrix, and Quintiles, and network with various companies that apply MDM and PIM solutions. We’ll host an “Ask the Experts” table with systems integration partners and present Informatica best practices and product roadmaps.

May 13-15: 2014 Informatica World Conference – MDM Sessions

As the industry evolves, Informatica takes great effort to share our successes and bring our customers together to discuss their experiences in putting data strategies to work. This year, there will be more than a dozen sessions on MDM at the main conference, including:

Register today for the Informatica World Conference and make the most of your trip to Las Vegas with a free pre-conference MDM Day. Learn more about both events online, or contact me if you have any questions. See you in Vegas!

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevancy a lot less.” I saw this powerful Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation in an MDM Summit presentation by Dagmar Garcia, senior manager of marketing data management at Citrix. In this interview, Dagmar explains how Citrix is achieving a measurable impact on marketing results by improving the quality of customer information and prospect information.

Q: What is Citrix’s mission?A: Citrix is a $2.6 billion company. We help people work and collaborate from anywhere by easily accessing enterprise applications and data from any device. More than 250,000 organizations around the globe use our solutions and we have over 10,000 partners in 100 countries who resell Citrix solutions.

Q:What are marketing’s goals?A: We operate in a hyper-competitive market. It’s critical to retain and expand relationships with existing enterprise and SMB customers and attract new ones. The marketing team’s goals are to boost campaign effectiveness and lead-to-opportunity conversion rates, while improving operational efficiencies.

But, it’s difficult to create meaningful customer segments and target them with relevant cross-sell and up-sell offers if marketing lacks access to clean, consistent and connected customer information and visibility into the total customer relationship across product lines.

Q: What is your role in achieving these goals?
A: I’ve been responsible for global marketing data management at Citrix for six years. My role is to identify, implement and maintain technical and business data management processes.I work with marketing leadership, GEO-based team members, sales operations, and operational experts to understand requirements, develop solutions and communicate results. I strive to create innovative solutions to improve the quality of master data at Citrix, including the roll-out and successful adoption of data governance and stewardship practices within Marketing and across other departments.

Q: What drove the decision to tackle inaccurate, inconsistent and disconnected customer and prospect information?A: In 2011, the quality of customer information and prospect information was identified as the #1 problem by our sales and marketing teams. Account and contact information was incomplete, inaccurate and duplicated in our CRM system.

Another challenge was fragmented and inconsistent master account information scattered across the organization’s multiple applications. It was difficult to know which source had the most accurate and up-to-date customer and prospect information.

To be successful, we needed a single source of the truth, one system of reference where data management best practices were centralized and consistent. This was a requirement to understand the total customer relationship across product lines. We asked ourselves:

How can we improve campaign effectiveness if more than 40% of the contacts in our customer relationship management system (CRM) are inactive?

How can we create meaningful customer segments for targeted cross-sell and up-sell offers when we don’t have visibility into all the products they already have?

How can we improve lead to opportunity conversion rates if we have incomplete prospect data?

How can we improve operational efficiencies if we have double the duplicate customer and prospect information than the industry standard?

How can we maintain high data quality standardsin our global operations if we lack the data quality technology and processes needed to be successful?

Citrix is investing in a marketing data management foundation to deliver better quality customer information to operational and analytical applications.

Q: How are you managing customer and prospect information now?A: We built a marketing data management foundation. We centralized our data management and reduced manual, error-prone and time-consuming data quality efforts. To decrease the duplicate account and contact rate, we focused on managing the quality of our data as close to the source as possible by improving data validation at points of entry.

pull together fragmented customer, prospect and partner information scattered across applications into one central, trusted location where it can be mastered, managed and shared on an ongoing basis,

organize customer, prospect and partner information so we know how companies and people are related to each other, which hierarchies and networks they belong to, including their roles and organizations, and

syndicate clean, consistent and connected customer, partner and product information to applications, such as CRM and data warehouses for analytics.

Q: Why did you choose Informatica?
A: After completing a thorough analysis of our gaps, we knew the best solution was a combination of MDM technology and a data governance process. We wanted to empower the business to manage customer information, navigate multiple hierarchies, handle exceptions and make changes with a transparent process through an easy-to-use interface.

Q: Can you share some of the results you’ve achieved?
A: Now that marketing uses clean, consistent and connected customer and prospect information and an understanding of the total customer relationship, we’ve seen a positive impact on these key metrics:

Informatica World 2013 is right around the corner, and I’m eager to tell you about all we have planned. This year, MDM will play a prominent role, as you can see by the sheer number of MDM-related sessions presented by Informatica customers, partners, and employees.

Recently, Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012. Amongst the usual suspects of Cloud computing, social user experience, and mobile applications, App Stores and Marketplaces were highlighted for the first time. According to the report:

“Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus.” (more…)